Teaching Moment on Baltimore Missed

Here’s what so-called “teachable moments” in academia generally miss—the decade those moments are in.

“There is a revolution taking place in the United States,” Stanford researchers Travis Bristol and Claude Goldenberg write of their Edutopia course “Teachable Moments and Academic Rigor.”* “What started in Ferguson, Missouri has marched on to other cities and, as Pedro Noguera notes, ‘widespread poverty, chronic interpersonal violence, and a nonfunctioning economy where work is scarce’ are the root causes.”

“Even while we, as a country, have barely begun to address the troubling meaning behind the incidents of violence between law enforcement and U.S. citizens of color in Ferguson, still more shockwaves of such violence ripple across America, notably including the more recent events in Baltimore.” Speaking of which, it is useful to look at the crime rate the Charm City’s denizens face before they pick up the phone to call the cops.

When the Baltimore Sun tallied up the grisly details on the city’s homicide rate so far this year, the results showed that there have been 100 murders since March. In the 94 cases in which the race was known, all but five of the victims were black.

Black lives do indeed matter. If they were here to say so, 89 Baltimoreans would probably agree.

*By the way, this course is “aligned with Common Core standards.”

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